


Eat of, Drink of, Know, then Forfeit

by Rednaelo



Series: Kingdom Hearts: Love Letter [5]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bad Touch, Loneliness, not like sexual or anything ansem's just gross
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 19:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18104840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rednaelo/pseuds/Rednaelo
Summary: The Darkness heard him and brought him to this place.  A huge, sprawling castle over a kingdom of open air.  But Riku never asked for a kingdom or a castle.  Just a place to escape to, a place where he could bring his friends.  He ran from the islands and into the Darkness but Sora and Kairi were left behind somewhere.  It’s not like he can run back now.





	Eat of, Drink of, Know, then Forfeit

**Author's Note:**

> You ever just not write dialogue? I did once. It was weird. Can't recommend. Don't think I'll be doing it again.
> 
> Anyway, here's some exposition.  
> -Bec

It’s barren.  A castle with half its walls torn asunder, exposing dingey copper pipes that have already turned the faintest green from breathing the open air too long and clockwork gears that turn and turn and might never stop.  The stone crumbles, it cracks in spiderweb sprawls and clings to the dust, pale gray and powdery.  And it takes an entire hour for Riku to wander and begin to suspect that there is no one else here but him.  His shoulders remain rigid, fists tight at his sides.  

There’s more to investigate before he can say anything with certainty.

The foyer leads to a dark and solemn library whose shelves slide and swing to reveal more books. The hallways stretch and twist and are lined with doors that may or may not open, regardless of the state of their hinges and knobs.  Riku tries all of them, breath held and forearms flexed tightly.  The ones that open (they’re all empty, all of the rooms) are left with their doors ajar.  Riku will return later, either to see what they hold or to see that they’ve been closed in his absence.  Both outcomes will be elucidating.

By the second hour, goosebumps broken out over the bare skin of his arms, Riku has wrenched a length of iron rebar from a hunk of concrete by its rusted end. Carrying it actually does wonders to alleviate the tension in his shoulders.  The only noises are still his own footsteps, his shoes on dusty carpet or weather-worn balconies.  The wind, too.  It whips past his ears when he wanders outside or billows up musty curtains in rooms with the window sashes thrown open. The air is brittle and sharp with cold; the next room Riku finds unlocked, he slips inside to see if maybe there are some clothes he can use to keep warm.

There’s a bed, foremostly. A huge one pressed against the back wall beneath a trellis of heavy curtains hanging in sheaves of violet so deep, Riku doesn’t realize their true color until he shifts one aside and it catches the light.  He sinks one knee into the mattress; the cushion dips and when his hands press down, the softness is magnificent.  Even Kairi’s bed wasn’t this luxuriant.  This bed is large enough that Riku and Kairi _and_ Sora could all sleep here, tossing back and forth, and never bump into each other once. The thought occurs and somewhere deep, Riku decides that this is their room. 

He leaves the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles of the blankets until they lay even and flat again. The pillows – he counts them, there’s twelve of them – are bulging enticingly around their bindings, overstuffed and soft.  Hopefully not full of dust.  Riku scours the bedroom, looking for closets and dressers that might have warmer clothes but finds nothing of use there.

The room itself, though….  It’s perfect.  He steps back out into the hallway and uses the rebar to scratch a star into the doorframe.  A glance up and down the hall and he’s memorized where it is before moving to the next door and testing it out.

There are more bedrooms, each quite different from one another.  One with an old piano fashioned from wine-red wood, one with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves with every shelf completely full, one with huge bay windows with couches and cushions built right in….  Rooms solemn and cold and empty but Riku looks at them and imagines his friends there, smiling and laughing and catching sight of him, their eyes alight with joy.  They had never dreamed of a castle of their very own.

Riku explores the castle until the nighttime overtakes the windows and leaves only the sharp, gray glow from the indoor lamps.  The kitchen he finds deep in the lower floors, closer to a basement than anything else.  But there’s a fire burning in the open hearth and food aplenty.  Fresh food, at that.  Fruits and vegetables and loaves of bread that crackle under his fingers when he squeezes them. 

If the food is fresh, there has to be someone here.  Riku finds a basket, swipes enough that will feed him for tonight and tomorrow morning and goes back to the bedroom he marked.  All the doors are still open; there’s no sign of anyone following behind him, nothing disturbed that he didn’t do himself.

The food is delicious if tepid and not particularly exciting. 

Riku puts the bit of rebar in the bed next to him when he crawls in to sleep.  In spite of how comfortably it cradles him, Riku struggles to let himself drift off, instead tossing fitfully about in a bed that’s unfamiliar and too big and too empty.

* * *

On the second day, Riku finds the chapel.  The whole castle is silent, unperturbed, just like this place.  Even Riku’s exploration and meddling doesn’t seem to have caused it any disturbance.  He’s like a single ant in a garden; what bother is he?

Riku very quietly sets the rebar down on the floor, wary of how it might clamor against the polished tiles if he isn’t careful with it.  His footsteps echo.  Riku feels like he’s knocking on some door every step closer he takes to the altar. Whose favor is he supposed to be entreating here? There’s no statuary or figureheads that could indicate whose place of worship this is.  Riku’s assuming that’s what the chapel is for, anyway.

He comes to a stop at the altar, which is more like a stone bowl set atop a pedestal in the middle of the floor.  It’s empty.  Riku looks down into it and sighs. 

The Darkness heard him and brought him to this place.  A huge, sprawling castle over a kingdom of open air.  But Riku never asked for a kingdom or a castle.  Just a place to escape to, a place where he could bring his friends.  He ran from the islands and into the Darkness but Sora and Kairi were left behind somewhere.  It’s not like he can run back now. 

That bed is way too big for only him.

Riku curls his hands around the lip of the altar and leans over it.

“It can’t just be me,” he murmurs to the empty vessel.  “I need them here, too.  I need to find them.  I need to know they’re safe.”

There’s no answer because of course there isn’t.  There’s no one there to see him beseech favors from a stone bowl but that doesn’t keep a prickle of anger from tingling along the back of Riku’s neck.

He shoves himself away from the altar with a sigh of aggravation and collects the rebar from the floor, no longer bothering to hold the silence.  Everything clatters; his footsteps stomp and Riku leaves the chapel entirely even though there seems to be more of it to explore.

He wanders the perimeter of the grounds instead.  Not that there’s much of it.  The castle itself defies understanding, suspended and broken all at once.  The days are longer and the nights too brief with the weather persisting in a lavender-gray overcast, all sunlight filmy when it shines thought the windows. And the grounds just give way to cliff-edges and a precipice with no boundaries to keep Riku from falling.  He goes back inside once it turns out there really is nothing out there but sky.

An empty castle.  A kingdom of barren sky. 

Riku finds laboratories and an indoor pool, libraries, opulent bathrooms, lounges and parlors and even a ballroom with dim chandeliers and exquisitely shining floors. He neglects to find the (perhaps only) one person who is also here, the one who’s stocking the kitchens.

Dinner is collected from the foodstores: more bread and a hard block of cheese, some dried meats, and enough fruit to eat both tonight and tomorrow morning.  Riku takes it back to his bedroom and eats there, with the bolt thrown on the lock and his back pressed to wall opposite the door.

The thing that continues to stump him is how none of the rooms look like they’ve been lived in.  _Ever_.  But, then again, that’s only for the rooms that he’s managed to open.

Tomorrow, Riku decides, he’s taking his rebar to the locks that haven’t admitted him.

* * *

By the end of the week, all of the doors are open.  Riku leaves his shoes in the big bedroom (his bedroom) and walks barefoot over the runner rugs and smooth marble and doesn’t bother bringing the rebar with him anymore.  Back and forth between the bedrooms.  Because, in the end, Kairi should have the room with the bookshelves because she loves reading.  They don’t all need to stay in the same room when the castle is so large they can each have their own.  Sora’s room is the one with the big windows but he doesn’t need the big desk that’s in there so Riku’s moving it across the hall to Kairi’s. 

There are different colors of blankets and pillows in one of the linen rooms that Riku managed to break open a few days ago.  Sora needs the pale-yellow sheets, Riku decides.  And the dark blue blankets.  Like the sun and the sky.  And Kairi’s bed should have the maroon blankets and those circular cushions instead of the lacey pillows that are there now.   Riku takes down the hangings from his own bed.  He’s keeping the biggest room; it’s his castle, it’s okay for him to have the big bedroom.  His friends won’t mind.

No one has bothered him.  Whoever’s keeping the kitchen supplied hasn’t shown their face and by now, Riku has decided that if they had a problem with him being there, they would’ve found him.  He leaves all the doors open and makes as much noise as he likes no matter where he goes and not a single person has come looking for an intruder. 

After dinner he sits in the room that will be Sora’s with one of the bay windows thrown open and stares out into the darkening dusk.  This room is larger than Riku’s old house.  _That_ house.  The house he never has to go back to because he has a castle of his own now where no one will bother him.  This is his fortress, where he will be safe and where his friends will be happy.

Once he brings them here.  Riku still doesn’t have any ideas about how he’s going to find them.

The winds slip and whisper around him, tickling against the strands of hair that have stuck, sweaty, to his cheek and forehead.  A shower probably wouldn’t go amiss.  Part of Riku is loathe to leave his perch at the window, watching the clouds deepen darkly in shades of saturated gray and slate.  The sun is hidden behind them at some unseen horizon.  Riku hasn’t seen the moon at all since he came here.

He ate enough to fill his stomach but there’s a supreme sense of emptiness that pervades Riku’s body as the silence bears down on him.  There aren’t even any stars to look up at.  Riku stares at the clouds and feels all at once nauseous by how much he hates them.  The clouds that never leave and the land that doesn’t lead to water and the rooms that are empty, even of strangers. 

Riku shoves himself back to standing and leaves Sora’s room (even though it’s not his room yet because he’s not even here).

The bathroom is also enormous, decadently so.   From polished spouts the water cascades into the tub, which is large enough to swim across and set into the floor, carved in dark marble.  Riku tosses his clothes wherever he feels like because he doesn’t care enough to try and keep them in the same spot.  His old clothes, the one he came here wearing, are folded up in the dresser in his bedroom.  The new ones he found in one of the locked rooms and inevitably, he’ll have to go back to find more.  Whether or not he’ll bother to wash the ones he was wearing remains to be seen.

At the moment, he thinks he hates them.  At the moment, Riku thinks he hates this entire castle.

Why didn’t Sora and Kairi come with him?  Riku brings the question up with himself again after posing it day after day.  The answer never comes closer no matter how many times he asks. 

Riku steps into the tub and submerges himself, face first into its steaming hot water.  It’s not really deep enough to swim in comfortably.  And Riku can’t adjust the temperature at all because the water flows and drains on its own, incessantly, without his will or whim to guide it. 

All in all, it’s a poor substitute for the diving that Riku once did back on the Islands.  Back when he would immerse himself in the ocean’s cool and constant waves.  Just to escape. 

Well, he escaped.  And now there’s no escaping.

Riku turns over onto his back and floats back up to the surface.  The warm water streams from his features and he wipes it from his eyelashes, blinking at the high, dark ceiling.  There’s nothing but the sound of the water running into the tub, splashing gently as he floats there, his toes glancing every now and then against the bottom of the tub.

As soon as he accepts the idea that he’s trapped here, then there’s no way Riku will ever be able to leave.  He’ll never find Kairi, he’ll never find Sora.  He’ll never bring them back here.  This castle will turn into a prison.

Riku closes his eyes and takes a deep breath of steaming air. 

“I can’t give up,” he says, the words humming low in his own head, his ears beneath the water.  “I won’t give up on us.”  The moment he does then he’ll be just as bad as _that_ fucker.  Riku takes another deep breath and grits his teeth and binds the promise around his heart: he won’t ever stop trying to find them.  He will never surrender to the complacency of just being prisoner.

There have always been moments of silence in Riku’s life.  Times of isolation, beats where he had not much else but his own thoughts and his ideas of what he might have to put himself through just to get to the next day.  He’s made it through every single day up until now and he’ll make it through all of the others. 

Once he’s clean and dry, Riku wraps himself in one of the bathrobes that’s folded neatly in the armoire near the door and makes his way back to the bedroom, guided by the stale light of the castle’s lanterns.  His room is dark, though.  No light except for what shines through during the day and the few candles he collected, burning flames that are tiny and tender like flickers of familiar warmth.  Riku takes one of the candles from the desk and sets it on the floor next to the bed, folding his legs to sit before its single taper of flame.

His shoulder lands against the side of the mattress and Riku slumps there, staring at the bit of light that the candle gives to the utter darkness of the bedroom. His hair is probably getting the sheets wet.  But it’s not like it really matters; the bed’s so big that it wouldn’t even reach Riku.

The windows are open over here too.  By now, the wind has become so mild that the candles are scarcely bothered.  The little tongue of fire twists and shivers on its wick.  Riku could put it out with a single exhale and take himself to bed.  But he’s not tired.  Just….  He’s caught between his promise and the lingering despair that’s taken root in his bones, in the base of his stomach. 

When Darkness covered the island, Riku felt the truth.  It came to him like a snap of instinct: a truth that he knew would change his life.  The Darkness was going to erase the Islands.  It would swallow them whole and devour all of those who stayed.  But if his courage was there, Riku could use that overwhelming force as a catalyst.  There would be no going back but he could _go_. He could leave and take Sora and Kairi with him and _damn_ that boat because it wouldn’t ever take them somewhere that _asshole_ couldn’t get to if he wanted.

The Darkness would take Riku from his reach forever.  So Riku seized the opportunity.  Kairi and Sora weren’t as quick to realize. 

_They’re still out there._

Riku knows this to be true as surely as he knew to take his opportunity when it presented itself.  Does that mean he just has to wait again?  Will the Darkness come here as well and consume his castle? How long would he even have to wait?  Or would waiting be pointless?

_It won’t do to simply linger._

Riku clenches his fist in his lap but it just as quickly goes lax again. He would _go_. He would, he would leave this castle in a heartbeat if he only had the means.  But there’s literally nothing.  There isn’t even land to walk or sea to sail, only the endless sky and Riku certainly can’t grow wings.  What would even be out there?  The Islands were swallowed by Darkness; Riku was propelled here by the same Darkness.  Sora and Kairi, in all likelihood, were taken to some other world by similar means.  Riku would need the Darkness to reach them.

_The Darkness can take me to my friends._

In fact, it’s the _only_ thing that can take Riku to Sora and Kairi, the only way to transcend worlds and wander between them.  Then his next course of action needs to be accessing the Darkness itself.  Riku drinks in a long inhale.  The sigh he gives stirs the flame of the candle so roughly that it snuffs.  The smoke wafts beneath Riku’s nose and leaves the scent of burnt cotton and hot wax behind.  Then all of the other candles go out at once and Riku is plunged into complete darkness.

Riku breathes in and breathes out.  The smoke isn’t even there anymore.

“If passage through the Darkness is what you seek, then I will impart it to you.”

A voice touches Riku’s ear, pressed to him like a person coming up from behind to whisper.  His eyes are open and he hasn’t moved a single inch.  The sudden spoken words startled him but his body didn’t even jolt.  Nor does he flinch when the clearly recognized sensation of a cold hand sliding over his wrist to grip his open palm fires all of his nerve endings.  Riku’s chest seizes hard with the urge to scream.

The rebar clangs violently against the wall and Riku stares at the dent he’s just made while he catches his breath.  He’s in bed.  The pallid light of morning fills the bedroom, dampened by the heavy drapery that hangs from the posts above the huge bed. 

Riku looks down at his hand, the one he felt gripped by that disembodied touch.  He has to scrambled and crawl over the mattress to look but he peeks over the side of the bed.  The candle is still on the floor, long cold and wax hardened.

He was wrong.  There is absolutely someone else here in this castle.

* * *

Riku extends his arm and faces his palm towards the wall.  He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. But apparently it doesn’t matter much: a pool of shadow fountains up from the floor and leaves a body-sized threshold looming just a few steps away.  Riku’s arm falls and he lets out a shaky, disbelieving laugh. 

“I did it,” he says under his breath.  He looks up to the portal of dark and holds his hand up again.  This time he clenches his fingers into a fist, willing the portal to close.  And it dissipates in a swirl of night, gone like it was never there in the first place.  “Wow.”  Riku marvels.  He didn’t even have to _try_ , the Darkness just heeded him.

His left hand….  If he thinks on it, he can rather vividly recall the phantom fingers – cold as stone – pressing along his palm and then gripping tight.  When he thinks on it and looks, wisps of darkness curl around his wrist and over his fingers. 

“Who are you?” Riku asks without really wanting the answer.  Fortunately, he doesn’t get one.  The daylight is still here, the conditions don’t seem to be right for reestablishing contact. 

Not that Riku thinks it would be a good idea to reconnect with whomever it is that dwells in the Darkness.  Not right now, anyway.  He’s got experimenting to do.

He generates another portal with the intention of it taking him to Sora’s bedroom.  For a moment, he just stands before it, feeling the brisk coolness of its swirling shadows lapping over his skin, like the familiar waves of the ocean.  It’s inviting.  Gentle and soothing.  Riku barely lets himself think and just lets himself be drawn.  He steps through.  And when the darkness fades from his eyes, he’s standing before the thrown-open bay windows, staring out at the muddled midday cloudiness.  He grins.

It’s working.

He generates another portal and steps back to his own bedroom.  Then he makes another and it takes him to the kitchens and back with breakfast in his hands.  After he eats, he uses another portal to go to the library and manages to make himself appear on top of one of the bookshelves when he tests out more location specificity. Stepping back and forth through the Darkness is like wandering to and fro in the shallows of the shoreline: easy and pleasant and by the end of it, Riku feels like he’s been enjoying himself even though he hasn’t been doing much but putting one foot in front of the other.

He hasn’t smiled since he got here, but now he can’t stop. 

So, of course, the next thing to try is to leave this world entirely.

That’s the part that has Riku’s smile fading away again. Not that he doubts that he could do it.  He’s proven so far that he can go anywhere with the Darkness opening to him.  All he has to do is keep the desire for a particular location in mind.

But now he doesn’t care for location, only for Kairi and Sora, wherever they are. 

Riku holds his hand out and thinks hard about wanting to find them, wherever they are.  There’s not even a stirring of shadows.  He sighs.  That was what he thought.  He lifts his hand again, simply thinking of the idea of another world.  It works _that_ time, the Darkness blooming up from the ground invitingly. 

It’s not that a lack of specificity is the problem.  It’s gotta be something else. 

Riku walks through the portal and comes out on the other side in an unfamiliar world.  Barren, dark, dusty, full of literally nothing but sand though in the distance, he sees the land rise up in hills that turn to mountains.  There are stars here.  Riku takes a deep breath. The air smells like dirt and is brittle with an utter lack of humidity.  It’s cold.  He’s really not dressed to stay here long.  But the stars….

Riku gazes up at them and reaffirms his promise. 

“Told you I won’t give up,” he says to the galaxy slowly turning overhead.  He thinks of his castle, opens another pathway, and when he steps through it, he’s back in his bedroom again.  A sigh he didn’t know he was holding escapes Riku’s lungs and he falls backwards onto his bed, suddenly exhausted. 

He made it back safely.  It seems, too, that opening the passages takes more out of him than Riku initially realized.  Still….  Riku pulls his feet up from the floor and curls onto his side atop the blankets.  The flow of the Darkness feels like it’s still with him, still rocking him gently, like the waves of the ocean from a home far, far away. 

* * *

He’s less than enthusiastic to recreate the circumstances that led to his first meeting with the Person in the Darkness.  All of the factors aligned yielded one particular result but Riku is going to chance that maybe he can wear more than just a dressing gown and also not be in the room where he sleeps.

And if it turns out these are necessary provisos, then maybe he just won’t bother and he’ll look for answers on his own.

For now, he makes his way to the chapel, simply by sidestepping through the Darkness, as he’s been doing for travelling the longer distances within the castle lately.  He brings an armful of candles with him and sets them up around the circumference of the altar.

Riku takes a step back and stares at this odd, meager offering of flame that isn’t even the real offering.  He’s supposed to plunge himself into absolute darkness. The sunset has already started; it’s only a matter of time. 

It only takes a moment for Riku to go back for the length of rebar that he’s been keeping close and then return again to the chapel.  Night has set in by that time.  Riku keeps the heavy iron gripped in both hands and stares at the encircled flames atop the altar.  His first entreaty to….  He doesn’t even know.  Whoever, whatever, might’ve been worshiped here. It went unheard.

But now Riku knows better.  He’s _not_ alone here.  There’s someone in the Dark, someone who granted him the gift that will allow him to find his friends, to travel between the worlds until he can bring them to this castle, this home he’s created just for them.  He wants to know that person, whoever they are.  Even if it’s just to say thank you.

Riku waits until the darkness is so close, there’s nothing left but the vivid orange glow of the candles.  He can’t see anything of the vaulted ceilings, the perfectly carved columns or stained glass.  Riku steps forward.  He takes a deep breath and with one sharp exhale, one candle goes out, and all the others are extinguished right along with it.

The silence presses closer than ever, wrapping itself around Riku until the wide room feels like its walls are only inches all around him. The fabric of his gloves groans only at a whisper as Riku twists his grip, but he can hear it as keenly as a cry.  In the space of one breath, Riku’s body begins to shudder.  This is entirely unlike the soothing, sweeping Darkness that Riku has come to know.  His eyes are open – they are, right? – but Riku sees absolutely nothing.  Every next breath is harder to take.  Riku’s isn’t positive that he could move in any direction.  Which is _absurd_ because he knows he can.  He’s not in a box, he’s in a huge room.  He can move; he can leave right now if he wants to.

Just to prove he can, Riku takes a step back.  His body impacts something that definitely wasn’t behind him before.  Hands clasp his upper arms and hold him frighteningly immobile before Riku can lift the rebar to attack.  Breath spills in hushed laughter against his shoulders and tickles his hair against the back of Riku’s neck.

“I was wondering when you’d seek me out again.”  The voice is deep, rumbling through the person’s chest and into Riku’s spine.  “Don’t you worry.  There’s plenty more I have to offer you, if you’re interested, that is.”

“What’s your name,” Riku demands with a strength that he musters from somewhere unknown.  The grip only tightens on his arms, his bare skin, now breaking out in a shiver of goosebumps.

“You may call me Ansem, young one,” the voice murmurs, closer now, leaning forward to whisper into Riku’s ear.  He feels the subtle weight of long, silky hair falling against his shoulder.  “And you, my apprentice?”

Riku swallows.  This is really it, right?  This…Ansem.  The dweller in the Darkness….  He didn’t _have_ to give Riku the ability to travel through the Darkness, but he did.  Without asking anything in return, he offered it freely.  Riku has doubts that he could stack to the ceiling.

“I don’t remember agreeing to be your apprentice,” he says instead of offering his name.  Another laugh.  It trembles and falls over Riku and he feels it touch every inch of bare skin.  He shudders hard but Ansem doesn’t release him.

“You didn’t agree but you did desire,” he says.  “I see it.  In the Darkness of your very heart, you’re craving more than the simple taste I have offered you.   Now, tell me, boy….  Your _name_.”

Riku is beyond trusting strange men.  He does not _trust_ Ansem at all.  But he has trusted the Darkness that was thus far bestowed upon him.  Trusted it enough to know that accessing more of it would only be a benefit, surely.  There’s no one else here.  Just Riku.  And…Ansem, apparently.  Ansem is the one with the Darkness at his command, oddly suffocating though it may be.

The choice is obvious.

“Riku,” he offers his name to the man he’s never seen.  “I want to know more. You'll teach me, right?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still trying to get my writing groove back. Not there yet but I'm getting closer every day. Thanks for sticking around for it. Hopefully I can start writing some cool shit up next.
> 
> come bug me on my [tumblr ](https://rednaelo.tumblr.com)if you like.


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